Justice undone: twenty years since the Bosnian genocide

Twenty years on from the Srebernica genocide, survivors and families of the victims are left asking: where is justice? A long term approach is needed to help survivors make peace with their past.

Survivors and mourners at the 19th year anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Flickr/Taylor Mc. Some rights reserved.July 11, 2015
marks the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. Twenty years
since “never again” came simply to mean “again”, when 8,372 Bosnian Muslims
were rounded up in the hot valleys of eastern Bosnia and executed by the Bosnian
Serb Army, led by General Ratko Mladić, while the “international community”
bolted.

What is often
forgotten outside of Bosnia is that Srebrenica was the culminating act of the genocide.
The systematic killings began in 1992. Approximately 677 concentration camps
were set up across the country for the rape of Bosnian Muslim women, torture
and mass executions. Grave crimes of unimaginable destruction were committed in
these camps. The Bosnian Serbs themselves coined the term “Etničko čišćenje”
(ethnic cleansing) to define their strategy, which was publicly announced on 12
May 1992.

The campaign
was based on the “Six Strategic Goals of the
Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina” and
was announced by then Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and these
strategies were unanimously adopted by the majority of Bosnian Serbs at the
Assembly. The document is a proof of mens
rea, the political intent to commit genocide. It depicts Bosnia’s “Wannsee
moment.”

The ICTY judgments have, therefore,
irrevocably established the facts. Some aspects of the legal proceedings have
left justice undone, however. For a number of survivors, some decisions are
illogical and have been politically influenced. For example, ICTY’s
bureaucratic rules allow convicted war criminals to be released after serving
only two-thirds of their sentence. At times some convicted war criminals have
been released for no clear reason. The
survivors and families of the victims are left asking: where is justice?

To further complicate the process of
seeking justice, in 2003 the international community imposed a new Bosnian
Criminal Code through the High Representative to Bosnia. The original Yugoslav
Criminal Code was not deemed sufficient to process war crimes in the country.
In 2013, after an appeal by two convicted war criminals, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that they had to
be tried by the law which was in use at the time of committing the crime: that is to say by the previous Yugoslav Code, which had now
been deemed insufficient, rather than the new law from 2003.

Subsequently, many
convicted war criminals had their sentences reduced and some were freed, only
to be arrested again after pressure from the public. The complex legal system,
political manipulation and indecisive international influence, understandably, has
sparked anger and distrust amongst families of the victims of genocide.

The denial of genocide and war crimes by a majority of Bosnian Serbs further
exasperates the process of reckoning with the past. Milorad Dodik, Bosnian-Serb
Prime-Minister of Republika Srpska as well as Bosnia’s richest man and a long-time
vociferous nationalist and genocide denier, ensured that in the years 2008-2014 1,898,900 BAM (€966,562) of Bosnia’s budget financed the
Srebrenica Historical Project, a project run
by genocide denier Stefan Karganović who consistently claims that less than
1,000 people “died”.

It is understandable then that the majority
of genocide survivors are sceptical of political gestures when it comes to the
Srebrenica genocide. The recent visit to the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial
Centre by Dodik has opened old wounds. A number of commentators have
exemplified this event as “a step forward,” only to question their own
reasoning a couple of days later after SDS, Dodik’s Party, announced that it
will hold a referendum in 2018 on
independence for the country's autonomous Serb Republic.

It is evident that a long-lasting approach
is needed to combat genocide denial to pave a way for survivors to reckon with
their past. If political leaders are interested, and if Dodik’s visit to the
Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre is to be taken seriously, than the quest
for justice must be in the forefront. All other political gestures will be
deemed, as they have been thus far, as political manipulation.

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About the author

Hikmet Karcic is a human rights activist based in Sarajevo, author of 'An Appeal for Truth' and Researcher at Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks.

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